cDNA Synthesis Kits and Reverse transcriptase

cDNA Synthesis Kits and Reverse transcriptase

When synthesizing a protein, DNA is transcribed into mRNA which is then translated into a protein. One difference between eukaryotic and prokaryotic genes is that eukaryotic genes often contain introns which are not coding sequences, in contrast with exons, which are DNA coding sequences. During transcription, intronic RNA is excised from the RNA primary transcript and the remaining pieces of the RNA primary transcript are spliced back together resulting in processed mRNA. The mRNA code is then translated into an amino acid chain that comprises the newly made protein.

Using reverse transcriptase polymerases, DNA can be synthesised from mRNA and total RNA. Thus it is a 'complementary' copy of the mRNA, and is thus called complementary DNA (cDNA). cDNA forms the substrate for the majority of qPCR gene expression experiments.